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The First “Royal”: Charles I as Celebrity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler
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Abstract

The seventeenth-century royalist book Eikon Basiliké (1649), probably the most successful political tract of the English revolution, was unlike any other royalist work published in the period. Its unique qualities suggest that it did something genuinely new. Those qualities may be best appreciated from the perspective of celebrity. While celebrity is ordinarily considered a modern phenomenon, the reception of Eikon Basiliké shows that the idea of celebrity arises in the early modern period, when a new relation between text and audience presented a commodified image of a famous person, an image that was consumed by its audience in a democratized marketplace. Ironically, Eikon Basiliké achieved commodification by relying on the traditional techniques of the art of memory—the fourth part of rhetoric—to create the illusion of closeness between king and subject that converted the king into a celebrity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 4: Special Topic: Celebrity, Fame, Notoriety , October 2011 , pp. 912 - 934
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

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